Sara Deraedt at Maxwell Graham / Essex Street

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Art abhors a vacuum, we critics race like rats to fill void with our hot air. Me, a pattern seeking brain, notices: D's continual insistence on containers, empty or to be filled. Vacuums, a "fishbowl" gallery, empty water bottles, prisons, and then now these... chambers. Several of these past works include in their materials list the cubic centimeters of volume they contain: 2010 cm³, 448000 cm,³ - Steel, screws, paint, 364480 cm³, etc. (Pedantically accurate, they include 10 cm³ of airspace in the 2L water bottle.) A small detail from an otherwise reticent artist for this exhibition: "All objects are human body size." In other words this is the space for you. You project yourself. The art just there to contain it.... yeah, like a prison. It reaps your profits.

This is not "audience-as-decoration." Because you are indentured to this bespoke void.



Enjoy your stay: The empty space for ghosts

“In Vitro” at Bodega

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This is an interesting exhibition documentation choice: the light from the street overpowers the gallery's, which, generally, we avoid. The gallery's lighting should be all encompasing, powerful, a scour to impurities. That this exhibition takes as its theme the shop window makes the reversal make sense, the gallery becomes a sort of inverse shop window itself. Which it always was. The fishtank of the street. But it's an interesting way of framing object which take the commodic display as their penchant. The Musee d'Orsay lights paintings with square spots fit to the paintings to make them appear as if the paintings themselves emit the light. It's important to know from where your light come.

Sara Deraedt at Essex Street

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Vacuums look like Star Wars robots, that is a technology not sleek but faux mechanical, overly so. The term "greeble" was invented for Star Wars' scene builders to describe the false detailing added to increase surfaces visual complexity, to thus exoticize if not heighten the inferred technology. Vacuums are a tube that sucks and yet their encasements evolve all sorts of sleek sexual-mechanical curves and corners, a shell that infers the inner without much referring to it. Agree with the assesment that these are more Konrad Klapheck than Christopher Williams, but only because the objects themselves are. Removing William's pornographic white light for the pseudo-affectlessness of point and shoot reveals the objects themselves as Klapheckesque. The casing isn't designed for the object inside but for person deciding upon it, obviously.


See too: Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator,